That’s EXACTLY what this is about. You all have to understand what happened here in Iowa last time.
I was organizing for Thompson in my county and did fairly well. I did mine the more traditional way of ID’ing likely voters. Understand I’m the 6th generation in my county and have been working in the party for about 10 years. If someone’s organizing I will generally hear about it.
Not with Huckabee. He organized thru the churches and pastors. It was mostly by word of mouth and volunteers and cost very little money. And caucus nite we walked in to a crowd 4 times as big as we ever had. Huck had got out voters that had never voted in a caucus and no one heard a word of it.
That’s what Bachmann is after. It’s not a bad strategy.
For evangelicals, Bachmann ‘speaks our code’:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2730850/posts
“I am here to support Michele Bachmann,” said Phil Dacosta, a 42-year-old Southern Baptist from Atlanta. “I don’t care about anyone else.”
“Dacosta, wearing a blue Huck PAC T-shirt, called himself heartbroken that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won’t run for president this year. As Huckabee’s campaign coordinator in Georgia, Dacosta helped the former governor win his state’s GOP primary in 2008, one of eight states Huckabee took that year with strong support from conservative Christians.
But with Huckabee out, Dacosta said he’s confident that fellow evangelicals will turn their eyes and organizing power to Bachmann, a three-term congresswoman from Minnesota.”
Thompson was a secular candidate with very limited appeal to Evangelicals. Sarah Palin is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. In 2008, the evangelicals had no other alternative. Huck was the only solid social conservative. Palin is rock solid on the social issues and is herself an evangelical. It will be obvious to everyone (if it isn’t already) that the nominee will be either Palin or Romney. Evangelicals, even those who are taken in by Bachmann and fail to see her as Romney’s stalking horse, will not want to waste a vote on her, because she can’t win the nomination. She can only help Romney.
Moreover, unlike Bachmann, Palin’s appeal is not just to Evangelicals but to economic libertarians as well 9the voters who went for Thompson in 2008). Palin will get the lion’s share of those voters at the caucuses as well.
Thanks for the confirmation of what happened. My memory and gut pretty much told me that was the scenario. Good to hear from someone ‘on the ground.’ (I was for Thompson then, too)
I won’t be surprised to see the same thing this year. It helps that Bachmann is from IA. But there is no way the IA “Christian Right” is gonna let Romney come in there and win the caucuses. Personally, I have a bit of a problem with that, as his Mormonism is the least of my problems with him.